Tools for Reddit Open Source Intelligence

Reddit is a hybrid of an online forum, a social media platform, and a news aggregator. Each interest group is referred to as subreddit, or sub.

Search Tools

If you're sticking with the Reddit ecosystem, you'll need a tool to start your research.

For a concise search tool, check out Cama's Reddit search [ https://camas.unddit.com/ ]. This tool is very easy to use. You can search by author (read Reddit username), subreddit, post or comment, post score, date range, and search term. We found documentation missing because we discovered that you can limit your search results to multiple subsections by separating each subsection with a comma.

For example, if you want to limit your search query of “OSINT” to the subreddits OSINT and Hacking you would enter it in the “Subreddit” field as “osint,hacking” without the quotation marks. Each subreddit is separated by a comma. We only found this out by playing around with the next search tool.

If you’re looking for something with a little more features, check out redditsearch.io [ https://www.redditsearch.io ] by pushshift.io.

redditsearch.io has the same features as Cama’s Reddit Search, in addition to search results returning articles from a specific domain name. Some of the functions are hit or miss, such as the “Aggregations, “Statisitcs,” and “DataViz” selectors. In the “Utilities” section there’s an “User Analyzer” and “Subreddit Suggestions” fields which don’t quite work and aren’t explained well in the “Help” section.

Lastly, for searches you can also dork to your heart’s content using your search engine of choice. If you want to search a subreddit, the dork looks like “site:reddit.com/r/[insert subreddit name] + keyword/username”, but without the quotation marks.

Let’s talk about another useful tool set when it comes to searching images.

Reverse Image Search

Karma Decay [ http://karmadecay.com/ ] is again focused on exploring Reddit, which is an image search tool that allows you to see where photos are posted to different subsections. It's helpful to see where images have been republished and may lead you to some interesting results.

You can upload images, copy/paste reddit URLs, or use the browser plugin that includes Karma Decay to do a reverse image search. One thing that may frustrate you is that it can take a while to process images, so don't expect Google Image Search to be so fast.

Deleted Posts

Finding any deleted posts helps OSINT investigations in several ways. First, you may find useful information and more key points to explore. Finally, if you are a law enforcement officer, a journalist, or if you are assisting an attorney in a legal matter, deleted posts may be a wealth of information for you. Respondents may be trying to hide their incriminating posts on Reddit and may provide additional clues for tracking.

Our standards for tools used to find deleted posts must include some way to indicate that the content you are viewing has been deleted.

The gold standard for this used to be Ceddit, as it would display posts deleted by users. With Ceddit no longer working, the next best option is Reveddit [ https://www.reveddit.com/ ]. But there is a warning. The deleted posts you find with this tool are from subreddit moderators who have deleted user-posted content for some reason.

The search function is very simple. You can search by username, subreddit (query format = r/[subreddit name]), link, or domain.

Honorable Mention

Redective [ https://www.redective.com/ ]

This search tool of sorts is limited to what you can look for. The options are "Search For A User," "Search The Front Page," and "Search A Subreddit."

If you search by username, you will be able to see profile information, as well as the subreddits they belong to, the words they use frequently, and the posts they have made.

If you search for the home page, Redective will display information about subreddits, as well as word frequencies and posts.

When you search by subreddit, it will provide detailed information about the sub itself, as well as the other types of information we have already mentioned.

There is also a filtering feature on the page to explore.